Dessert Trail

Chini zindabad. Two words that could get you lynched, even today, in India. As Delhi’s sweetshop Chaina Ram Sindhi Halwai (beside Fatehpuri Masjid, in Chandni Chowk) discovered, even though none of it was their fault, and they were not guilty of pro-Chinese propaganda. But to an irate mob descend­ing on the shop back in 1962, ‘Chaina’ was ‘China’ misspelled, and therefore to be punished. The shop was wrecked, and business took time to recover.

Ghantewala, just down the street, has taken nine years to recover.

The story goes that ‘Ghantewala’— roughly, the ‘man with the bell’—was the name bestowed on Lala Sukh Lal Jain, a migrant from Amber in Rajasthan, who set up the establishment in 1790. Jain, some believe, used to go about selling sweets, ringing a bell to draw the attention of passersby, and this bell perhaps attracted that epithet. Whatever the reason for the name, there is no doubt that Ghantewala proved immensely suc­cessful: for over 200 years, it was arguably Delhi’s most popular sweetshop, patronised by kings and princes, statesmen and celebri­ties. It was only in 2015 that the shop shut down, unable (so it is surmised) to cope with legal and licens­ing issues, and—more to the point— with the brash, big new Haldiram’s that had opened right opposite.

In 2024, the Haldiram’s is still there, and Ghantewala, in what seems like an act of courage, reopened in August. It is not the same shop, though the sign proudly proclaims ‘200 Years of Celebrations’, and the look is all upmar­ket, modern. There is air-conditioning, seating upstairs, and no pot-bellied halwai frying pooris or jalebis up front, the hallmark of any sweetshop worth its salt in North India.

But step in, and all the old favourites are there. There is sohan halwa, dense and ghee-laden, one of Ghantewala’s signature sweets along with Karachi hal­wa, jiggly and chewy and brightly hued (though Ghantewala, in its swish new avatar, keeps the colour of this mithai suitably muted, not the neon pink, orange and green of yore). There are barfis: from the much-loved kaju katli to the fruity anjeer barfi, one of those rare mithais based on a fruit. There are laddus, motichoor and mawa and even raagi, in keeping with the times. Panjiri, pinni, badam ki lauj. Syrup-soaked jalebis, roshogollas, and malpuas; balushahis crunchy with not just the ghee in them but also the thick layer of sugared glazing.

There is a lot of sug­ar here. Unsurprising­ly, perhaps, given that most Indians have a sweet tooth. And that, too, is unsurprising: sugar, after all, has been in use in India for many centuries now. While Saccharum of­ficinarum—sugarcane, to give it its scientific name—is native to Southeast Asia and ad­joining areas, Indians probably first figured out how to produce crystallised sugar sometime during the 4th century CE, in the Gupta period. Two ancient words describing sugar, in fact, have made their way into English: ‘sarkara’ (originally a Sanskrit word meaning ‘gravel’, denot­ing sugar crystals) morphed into ‘sugar’ (and of course ‘shakkar’); and ‘khaand’ (raw sugar), which migrated into English and became ‘candy’.

Sugar, too, went places: something so irresistible was bound to travel, given the human body’s affinity for energy-rich sweetness. Europe, used to sweetening food with honey, took to sugar with glee, though—before cane plantations in the Caribbean made sugar easily available— it was expensive enough to be a highly prized luxury. Consuming sugar in Europe was, for many centuries, a status symbol. To be fat and to have decaying teeth because of an overindulgence in heavily sugared food was a sign of wealth. To put vast quantities of sugar in everything, including vegetable and meat dishes (which would end up being more sweet than salty) was a way of saying you had sugar to throw around.

In India, we had no such problems. Sugar has always been abundant. And, given that our regional cuisines are so varied, the array of sweetmeats from across the country is quite mind-bog­gling. From the chhena-based sandesh and roshogollas of Bengal to ghee-rich Mysore pak and puranpoli; from the squiggly jalebis and gulab jamuns that are de rigueur on North Indian banquet tables to halwas, laddus, barfis… the range of Indian sweets is inexhaustible.

And yet, a closer look into the histo­ries of some of our most popular sweets, and you see just how eclectic these are. Some, like the many laddus—boondi, motichoor, coconut, besan among them—like the much-loved milk-and-rice puddings (kheer, payasam, payesh, and similar versions) have been known in India for centuries altogether. The Rigveda, around 1500 BCE, mentions what is arguably one of India’s oldest sweets: the apupa, described as a ‘cake of barley flour, boiled in water or fried in ghee, before being dipped in honey’: a venerable ancestor, in both name and nature, of the modern malpua or pua.

Added to these over time have been many more sweets, a large number of them originally from the Middle East. From Arabia and Persia, Iran and Turkey came thousands of traders, soldiers, ambi­tious conquerors and curious travellers, and with them came the dishes they knew. Along with the biryanis, kababs and samosas, they brought with them sweets. Halva, still an often deeply dense, rich candy made of sesame seeds or nuts in the lands of its origin, ended up as the Indian halwa—the name unchanged, but the base ingredients broadened into just about whatever might suit one’s fancy. Carrots, of course, but also bottle gourd, pumpkin, moong dal, and flours of differ­ent kinds, from semolina to chickpea. The semolina halwa, much as we might like to lay claim to it, is also found in places like Turkey and Greece, and it is unmis­takably a Western cousin of sooji halwa.

Gulab jamuns may have originally been the luqaimat of the Middle East: small, deep-fried doughnuts drenched in syrup. And jalebis (or jilipi, if you are in Bengal) are obviously the Indian equiva­lent of the Persian zulbia, the Middle Eastern zlabia/zalabia: squiggly, roughly concentric circles of a fermented batter, deep-fried and soaked in syrup. Thin and irresistibly crisp or soft and substantial, the jalebi is one of those sweets that seems to be popular pretty much across India. In Bengal, you even have a version known as chhenaar jilipi, hand-shaped from chhena, the ricotta so popular as a base for sweets in Bengal.

Speaking of which: chhena is one of those base ingredients we owe to the outside world. In fact, to colonists. European colonisers—the British, French and Portuguese in particu­lar—did leave a mark on desserts, but primarily in the form of European desserts transplanted into India and subjected (as Indians are wont to do) to fusion. Christmas cakes with chironji, ghee and cashew nuts are a result of these East-West marriages; so are Goa’s bebinca and Thoothukudi’s cashew nut macarons. But the Portuguese, more by accident than design, introduced India to what was to become an integral part of sweet making: chhena. It is believed (by some, not all) that a cheesemaking initiative by the Portuguese in Bandel (in Bengal’s Hooghly district) resulted in the local cooks—mostly of Burmese or­igin—learning how to curdle milk with the use of an acid. The crumbly chhena thus formed was further processed and smoked to yield Bandel cheese; but local cooks realised that it could also be used, in its raw form, as a base for sweets.

And what a find that turned out to be. In 1868, a young man from Sutanuti, 22-year-old Nobin Chandra Das, shaped chhena into spherical dumplings and cooked them in syrup to create the roshogolla. About 50 years later, Nobin Chandra Das’s son, Krishna Chandra Das, took the roshogolla even further, dunking it in thickened milk (‘malai’), to make rasmalai. Other similar sweets, all based on chhena but with differences in shape, treatment, and additional ingredients, followed: chamcham, mochak, kheermohan, lalmohan, sitabhog, and countless others.

Ghantewala does not do much with chhena, but yes: the ro­shogollas are there, as is the rasmalai, both so popular in North India that one tends to forget that this is an import from Bengal. But across the road from Ghantewala, Annapurna Bhandar still makes its own chhena as a precursor to the array of chhena-based sweets it offers.

IF YOU ARE IN Chandni Chowk, crisscrossing between Ghantewala, Annapurna, and Chaina Ram, you may as well take the trouble to go a little further and see where at least some of the ingredients these sweet shops use come from: the area known as Khari Baoli. Named for a long-vanished brackish water step-well, Khari Baoli is today one of the world’s largest and busiest spice markets. Walk through here, and every sense is engaged. The clamour is busy-ness at its peak; the colours range from the fiery crimson of dried chillies to the bright orange and yellow of marigolds that are sold in heaps at the entrance to the market. And the aromas. The pungency of the chillies, which hit first and last the long­est; the sweetness of cinnamon and the fragrance of green cardamom.

The cardamom, in fact, is what comes to mind most emphatically when one thinks of Indian sweets, its seeds pound­ed and mixed into halwas, or sprinkled sparingly atop a sweet as a garnish. Other spices—nutmeg and cinnamon among them—are also used in Indian confectionery, but far less frequently.

What is used, though, and which you can also find in Khari Baoli, is the most expensive spice in the world: saffron. Its delicate, intensely aromatic threads (the stigmas of the Crocus sativus flower) are traditionally used to lend a gloriously golden hue and a distinct flavour to kesar pedas, rasmalai, rava kesari, and shrikhand, among others. Saffron, of course, is so prohibitively expensive that the spice (cultivated mostly in Kashmir) is rarely used for bulk confec­tionery-making: turmeric ends up being the stand-in when it is colour that’s needed, or lower grade saffron when one would like to show off the strands as well. There’s also a spurious version that consists of dried marigold petals.

Saffron from Kashmir, cardamoms from Kerala. Raisins and pistachios, imported from Afghanistan. Chhena, originally from Bengal, but thanks to the Portuguese, came to India. Cornflour (the base ingredient for both the jiggly Karachi halwa as well as the falooda sev, the slip­pery vermicelli that accompanies kulfi)— processed from maize, which probably only came to us from South America in the wake of Columbus’ landmark discovery—along with cashew nuts, without which we would not have had kaju katli, that mainstay of Diwali mithai boxes. Condensed milk, custard powder, tutti-frutti. Sliced bread (shahi tukda, anyone? Before the British introduced ‘double roti’, the bread used for this lus­cious dessert might have been sheermal, cut into pieces and deep fried before being soaked in syrup and drenched in rabri). Our sweets owe themselves to the world.

The wares on sale at Ghantewala and Annapurna, Old Famous Jalebi Wala, Chaina Ram and dozens of other large and small sweetshops across Chandni Chowk—not to mention being peddled by itinerant vendors, à la Sukh Lal Jain— are dazzling in their variety. Even more dazzling is their provenance, the wonder­ful way in which they reflect our history. How they show, in a few memorable mouthfuls each, the distance we’ve trav­elled, the cultures we’ve interacted with, the influences we’ve happily embraced.

(End note: the ‘chini’ in the common Hindi word for sugar does refer to China. While Indians were the one who first processed sugarcane juice into khaand or gur, it was the Chinese who carried that process forward and turned it into crystal­lized white sugar. During the days of the British Raj, sugar had to be imported from China, and it immediately got tagged with the name ‘chini’. Another, possibly apocryphal, story has it that a Chinese immigrant in Kolkata, Tong Achew, established the first sugar mill in India, in around 1788—and thus sugar came to be equated with the Chinese).

Chandni ChowkculturefoodGhantewala ConfectionersJalebiladdusRabriShahi Tukda